Battlecry
by The Sad Privateer
Summary: "You are either a genius, or the luckiest idiot on the planet," she remarks to him one day. "And I'm leaning towards the latter."


**There needs to be more Bart/Queezle. In fact, there needs to be more Bartimaeus fics, period. Thus, I'm making my contribution with this little drabble series. There's fifty-some of them, and they go generally in order, more or less. Some are probably AU. References to all four books are made. I understand that there should be paragraph breaks in almost all of them, for dialogue and such, but I didn't like the way it looked when I wrote it like that, so I didn't do it in any except the very last one. Please forgive me. :3 Enjoy.**

**~.~**

**Introduction** – From across the battlefield, Queezle's Detonation takes out the foliot sneaking up behind a mighty minotaur. Twenty minutes later, the same minotaur is lifting the heavy slab of Palace wall that her prone form is trapped beneath.

**Attraction** – It's the fourth time over the course of the battle that Bartimaeus has found himself fighting back-to-back with her, and he decides that it just _can't _be coincidence anymore.

**Empire** – "Don't worry about it," he tells her, although she finds that a bit insensitive considering they're standing in the smoldering wreckage of a recently mighty empire. "In seventy years another one will pop up somewhere and then they'll just have us go tear it down all over again. Bit annoying, actually."

**Friend** – "Bartimaeus!" She runs forward, smiling broadly, and hugs the Egyptian boy tight about the neck. When she draws away, he blinks suspiciously at her. "Why . . . did you do that?" She grins and tilts her head to the side. "Because you are my friend."

**Abuse** – Having been lucky with her masters thus far, Queezle does not share Bartimaeus's extreme hatred and loathing of the magicians who summon the djinn. But from time to time she can see the blackness in his spirit, the sores in his essence, left there by those who are too heartless to care, and she _understands_ it.

**Villain** – She stares down at her feet, looking troubled. "Bartimaeus, are we the good guys? Or are we the villains?" Her friend snorts scornfully, looking bitter. "Does it matter?"

**Difference **– He tilts his head to the side the day she accuses him of being a coward, studying her silently. "Am I?" he asks quietly after a moment. "Or am I simply a survivor?"

**Bet** – He returns to her within five minutes, proudly displaying the underpants he'd stolen from the Emperor – while the man was still wearing them. She pouts and fishes around in her pockets for the gold she owes him.

**Wasteful** – "Such a waste of life," the lioness says with a sigh as she rolls the fresh carcass into the ditch. The gargoyle wipes his bloody fingers on the grass beside her. "There's more where he came from," is his only comment.

**Rivals** – As soldiers, their orders are simple: Kill the enemy. But as the mighty hawk-headed warrior in Egyptian garb and the ferocious she-leopard clad in the colors of her Arabian king bear down upon each other in the center of the bloody battlefield, the same thing is going through both their minds: _You are not my enemy._

**Fortune** – He studies the creases on her palm for a minute before relaying what the future has in store for her. "You're going to make an excellent main attraction at a freak circus someday. Also, watch out for the pygmy marmosets when you're in Arabia. They bite." Her detonation sends him through the wall.

**Trouble** – "Here comes trouble," the hawk-headed warrior on guard duty drawls as Queezle pads by, and the imps whistle suggestively until she loses patience and tosses them over the battlements. Before she can get her claws on him, Bartimaeus turns and runs for it.

**Clue** – Several djinni stand on the sidelines, watching a furiously screeching she-leopard chase a hawk-headed warrior around the courtyard. "That's how you know when a girl is into you," one of them remarks to the others. "She tries to kill you on a regular basis."

**Monster** – "You're not a monster," he reassures her quietly. "They have no right to say that." But deep down inside, he know that she _is _and they _do_.

**Wounded** – "Don't _worry_ Bartimaeus; I – I can stand on my own . . ." But her essence is faded and muddled, the eyes of the beautiful girl are glassy and vague. He catches her about her blurring shoulders as she stumbles. "Just because you _can _doesn't mean you _should_," he chides.

**Spatula** – He's fashionably late to the party (as usual), so he doesn't know how exactly Faquarl and Queezle ended up dueling it out with meat cleavers in the middle of the kitchen, but he throws himself into the fray regardless. Faquarl turns on him, and he fishes around wildly for something to use as a weapon, hoping to score a blade. Instead his hand closes around – a spatula. Damn.

**Behold** – "You're beautiful," he says suddenly, and the dark-haired girl turns to look at him, a slight flush staining her porcelain skin. "This isn't me," she says quietly, but he only snorts. "Not _this_," he says, lightly touching the side of her perfect face, and she knows then that he's not looking at her on the first plane, or the second or the third, but on one where he can see _her_. Dorsal tubes and all.

**Map** – "Who needs one of those?" he asks dismissively. A week later, they're _still _wandering around through the desert.

**Shameless** – Queezle knows that Bartimaeus is an actor, and she suspects that he's completely shameless, too. That suspicion is confirmed one day when she hears a story about a king, a temple, and a hippo in a skirt.

**Scream** – They interrogate her for five hours straight, and as he listens helplessly to her agonized screams echo through the walls, he's in just as much pain as she is.

**Comfort** – Her weak hand slips through the magical iron bars of her prison, blood-encrusted nails scraping the dusty floor until her questing fingers intertwine with his.

**Subtle** – He appears in the pentacle suddenly amid a swirling black vortex, all spikes and muscles and tattoos, fangs gnashing and all seven eyes aglow. The magician is unimpressed. From the pentacle next to him, an elegant she-leopard snickers.

**Threat** – "Touch her, and I swear to Ra, I _will kill you_," Bartimaeus whispers venomously, and it's the first thing he's ever said that Faquarl thinks might actually be the truth.

**Backup** – In an existence where friendships were fleeting and loyalties could shift as quickly and unexpectedly as the desert dunes, there was always one thing that they both hoped and prayed would never change: He had her back, and she had his.

**Canine** – "You did _not _just sniff my butt." He was lucky that greyhounds could run so fast, or else her Detonation would have caught him somewhere far more lethal than the tail.

**Jealous** – She flirts shamelessly with the blacksmith's son for a good hour straight, occasionally wiggling her eyebrows teasingly at Bartimaeus over the boy's shoulder. The djinni tolerates it for as long as he can before casually flicking a wrist and sending the subject of Queezle's attention smashing through five walls and flying off a cliff.

**Strategy** – "Checkmate," he drawls, smirking at her over the chessboard as he secures his ninth straight win in a row. He admires Queezle's persistence, but after Prague, Jerusalem, Jericho, Uruk, Karnak, Egypt, seven different wars, countless skirmishes, and five thousand years, he's not going to lose a game of strategy to _her_.

**Flaw** – "You always did have a weakness for beauty, Bartimaeus," Faquarl says with a slight smirk as they watch the retreating figure of Queezle. As if he _needs_ reminding.

**Touch** – One of the worst things about being summoned is the fact that they are forced to take a physical form at all times, but he has to admit that there's something _fantastic _about the feel of her skin beneath his fingers.

**Speak** – "Že líto _blázen, _se non ottiene la testa gonfia avvitato indietro dritto, Aku akan menggunakan mereka ridiculously manset besar-nya dan _ad usum—_" As she listens to Bartimaeus rant about his master, Queezle counts the dialects he unconsciously uses on her fingers. She loses track somewhere around thirty.

**Damned **– "_Damn you_, Bartimaeus!" she howls at him in frustration, but he only rolls his eyes a bit. "If I had a diamond for every time I've heard _that_."

**Dance** – She supposes that since he _is _Bartimaeus, it shouldn't come as a surprise to her that he's excellent at dancing the Tango. But she is surprised that he feels the need to teach _her_, and just how much she likes it.

**Banter** – They call it "casual wordplay." The imps just call it "flirting."

**Replicate** – Once and a while, when the gravity of the earth becomes a painful ache in their bodies, they will take the form of mighty hawks and launch themselves side-by-side into the wind. This weightless sensation is the closest they can get to the invigorating chaos of the elusive Other Place.

**Fury** – Queezle doesn't realize just how powerful she is until the day that Jabor's perfectly-timed Detonation shatters the gargoyle's Shield and hits it's chest, blasting the lithe form thirty feet back and into a wall, whereupon Bartimaeus hits the floor and does not move again. Despite the fact that Jabor is several thousand years older than her and roughly six times her size, he's in _tears _by the time Queezle's finished with him.

**Unintended** – Bartimaeus tumbles from the trap door above Queezle and plummets straight down onto her head with a yelp. It's not until the dust clears that they realize that he's lying spread-eagled on top of her. He rolls away and they spend they next five minutes coughing awkwardly, but he never mentions that he could have landed on his feet if he had wanted to.

**Eureka** – "I have an idea!" he exclaims triumphantly, but doesn't understand why she immediately begins running in the other direction.

**Name** – Names are sacred, powerful, never to be thrown about casually, and yet . . . He finds that he wants her to know. "His name was Ptolemy," he says quietly, staring down at his dark-skinned hand.

**Excite** – The elegant girl of unusual beauty slips past him, her skin brushing against his, and inside his narrow chest the Egyptian boy's heart rampages wildly, and then splutters and dies. Her uncanny hearing picks it up as she walks away; She smothers a snicker. He scowls.

**Idiot** – "You are either a genius, or the luckiest idiot on the planet," she remarks to him one day. "And I'm leaning towards the latter."

**Mystery** – "Bartimaeus . . . _why _are you a fluffy pink bunny?"

**Target** – "It's nothing personal, sweetheart," Faquarl whispers in her ear, the heafty body of the greasy cook pinning the girl of unusual beauty against the wall, the cold tip of his meat cleaver tickling her throat. "But Bartimaeus of Uruk has many weaknesses, and I like to take advantage of them. It's just your bad luck that you're his biggest weakness of all."

**Favor** – The wicked woman who is Queezle's master barely has time to register what has happened before his Detonation blows her into oblivion and she is gone forever. Queezle feels her ties to the Earth die with the magician, and the wonderful song of the Other Place calls her home, but she resists desperately, reaching out for the Egyptian boy who is watching her disappear with a sad smile on his face, the one who must stay here and endure his painful slavery, the one who has done her this incredible favor.

**Babies** – "I think they're kind of cute," she admits, to which he wrinkles his nose. "They're disgusting," he says. "They're small and fat and parasitic, and on top of that they're loud, they stink, and they take twenty years to grow up. What's cute about that?"

**Impulse** – She's got him backed up against a wall, her lips on his and her fingers twisted in his hair, and he's got absolutely no idea what she's doing or when all this even started, but _damn _does it feel _good_.

**Foreshadowing** – "I _hate _golems," she says with a frown, to which he shrugs and replies, "I haven't seen one since Prague. You probably don't have anything to worry about."

**Maniac** – She knows that he's done something despicable and probably extremely amusing whenever _that laugh _spills from his lips, that I'm-going-to-rule-the-world-muahahaha cackle that is traditionally used by warlords, magicians, and psych ward escapees.

**Heartbreak** – "Yeah, well, that's the way it works, isn't it? They all let you down eventually," he says bitterly, sounding every one of his five thousand years. She wants to promise that _she'll _never let him down, but she thinks he'll only laugh.

**Poison** – As Queezle watches the writhing Egyptian boy, faded and flickering, his face contorted in pain, be released to the Other Place, she thinks that there is nothing more terrifying than seeing your best friend take a silver bullet through the skull.

**Impression** – Queezle meets John Mandrake once. For the entire five minutes that she is in his presence, she watches him chase Bartimaeus around the summoning chamber in a shocking display of lack of dignity as the djinni dances about, making faces and wondering out loud if the magician's suit really _is _that hideous or if Mandrake just looks terrible in _everything_.

**Wonder** – As the decades pass, he finds himself more and more troubled; The tale of Asmoral and Ianna has been on his mind a lot lately, and he's begun to wonder, _Would _I _do that? _

**Almost . . . **

"Bartimaeus?"

"Yes, Queezle?"

A moment of silence.

"Oh, nothing."


End file.
